The 9 Biggest Gaming Bummers of 2013

It's been an exciting year for videogames, from the launch of new consoles to the release of many surprisingly good indie games. And we'll talk about that in due time. For now, we're recapping the things that bummed us out about 2013.

In years past we've looked at the games that most disappointed us during the previous 12 months, but for the most part, singing out specific titles didn't seem right this year. First off, it's difficult to be truly disappointed by bad games you can smell coming a mile away.

Secondly, the most disturbing things this year seemed to us to be general trends, not specific problems. When disappointment comes in waves versus isolated incidents, it's more troubling. But we are nothing if not optimists here at Game|Life. So we'll offer a few silver linings as we run down the biggest bummers of 2013.

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Xbox One's Erratic Voice Command System

Xbox, turn on. Xbox, turn on. Oh, right. Xbox, on. XBOX. ON. There we go. Xbox, watch TV. XBOX. WATCH TV. NO XBOX NOT WHAT'S ON MTV, WATCH TV. Microsoft sold Xbox One's voice command system, powered by the new Kinect camera that bumps up the retail price of each $500 Xbox One, as a core feature of the new console. And it is great when it works. But it's got a lot of problems. It's hard to remember exactly what command you need to issue at any given moment: It's not "Xbox, play disc" or "Xbox, watch Blu-ray," it's "Xbox, go to Blu-ray player" or nothing. Also, if you have a lot of people in the room, the accuracy of voice commands gets much, much worse even if people aren't talking very much. Microsoft promises that this is just the beginning of the Xbox One's user interface, and given what happened over the lifespan of the Xbox 360, there's every reason to believe that's true. But as for now? Big bummer. Xbox, off.

XBOX. OFF. OH GOD DAMN IT. XBOX, TURN OFF.— Chris Kohler

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Launch Game Syndrome Strikes Again!

It's hard to be surprised when day-one games for new consoles turn out to be rushed and limited in scope, but it's a bummer when those games looked so good from afar. Much was made of Knack, the character action game personally overseen by PlayStation 4 system architect Mark Cerny, but the finished product turned out to be a bit of a letdown. Ditto Ryse: Son of Rome, the God of Warish action game from Crytek, which looked very pretty but ended up being incredibly repetitive. These new consoles didn't break the launch-software curse, but so goes the way of early adoption. You take your risks. — Chris Kohler

Image: Microsoft

Free-to-Play Sequels to Regular Paid Videogames

PopCap Games won our hearts in 2009 with Plants vs. Zombies, the charming, addictive tower defense game that pitted creatively powered vegetation against the living dead in an epic battle for the front lawn. Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time finally arrived this year; it's a time travel-themed sequel with an unfortunate addition: free-to-play. Although the initial levels felt easy enough, the difficulty quickly ramped, locking some of the coolest plants and levels behind walls of money and frustration that soured the experience. Rather than a challenge, it turned into a mind game where I spent more energy trying to fend off the game's escalating feeling of manipulation and locked doors than I did fighting zombies. I would have happily paid five, even 10 dollars for an uncompromised gaming experience, rather than a “free” experience that ends up feeling like you're being eaten by seagulls. — Laura Hudson

Image: PopCap Games

No Backward Compatibility in Next-Gen Consoles

For all its faults when it launched in 2006, as least PlayStation 3 was able to play any piece of PlayStation software you could throw at it. PlayStation 4 is less of an upgrade than a lateral shift, since it's not backward compatible with anything -- including the vast library of content you've been downloading all this time. It's the same sad story with Xbox One. We understand why Sony and Microsoft wanted to shift to x86-based architectures, but it's still totally disappointing. If Sony were to unleash an all-you-can-eat buffet of classic PlayStation games over its Gaikai streaming service, that might make up for the lack of backward compatibility. We'll see how awesome it truly is whenever Sony gets around to launching it. And Microsoft had better start thinking about offering a similar service in case Gaikai takes off. — Chris Kohler

Electronic Arts Is Terrible at Launching Online Games

Industry behemoth Electronic Arts isn't so great at this "online gaming" thing. In March, the launch of the SimCity reboot became a colossal DRM disaster. EA's decision not to include an offline mode led to a game with servers so broken that players who paid full price weren't allowed to play. To compensate for the flaws, EA decided to actually begin removing features from the game.
Months after its launch of Battlefield 4, the multiplayer is still a mess — especially for those using Playstation 4 or Xbox One. Save file corruption, crashes, and a one-hit-kill glitch plague the game. Silver lining: Uh, at least EA killed the online pass program? — Ryan Rigney

Image: Electronic Arts

That Game You Kickstarted Isn't So Great

It seems like everything we backed on Kickstarter is over budget or behind schedule, and some of the titles that actually saw release are hardly the games we were promised. Shadowrun Returns and Star Command both landed like farts at a wedding, and although The Banner Saga isn't coming until 2014, its free-to-play companion app (subtitled Factions) proved to be a total grindfest. But the biggest disappointment of all has to be Peter Molyneux's Godus: It had an interesting premise that in practice turned into a clickstravaganza of epically boring proportions. It's earned absolutely brutal reviews on Steam, where it's available as an early access game. — Ryan Rigney

With any luck, the Kickstarted games that have spent a little longer in the oven won't come out so underdone.

Image: 22cans

No Next-Gen For You!

The next generation is here! If you live in certain countries, that is. If not, well, I guess you should have been born elsewhere.

Microsoft launched Xbox One in only 13 territories this year, and gamers elsewhere in the world (actual major countries you've heard of like Norway and Russia and Japan) are still waiting for a release date announcement. (Rumor has it that the wait might be very long indeed.) And you do know Sony is a Japanese company, right? Well, maybe you can explain why it's not offering PS4 there until February. — Chris Kohler

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Everything's a Shooter Now

The Last of Us is one of the most well-crafted triple-A games of the last year — the last generation, even — and I loved exploring the world of BioShock Infinite. But if I had my druthers, Last of Us would be a survival horror game and BioShock Infinite would have been a point-and-click adventure. Instead, the triple-A world is getting progressively more shooterfied. If you're not firing guns, driving cars, playing sportsball or doing some combination of the three, it ain't a videogame no more in the eyes of blockbuster publishers. Remember when Parappa the Rapper was a triple-A game? It's depressing that a few years later we can have cutting-edge graphics or unique gameplay but not both. The silver lining is of course that indie gamemakers are becoming increasingly able to cheaply generate games that are on the right side of the Good Enough line. They don't look like Last of Us, but they don't look like Pong either. — Chris Kohler

Image: Irrational Games

Wii U

In last year's Disappointments piece, I said Nintendo's job for 2013 was not "just to release more Wii U games but to dramatically improve the user experience." Who knew it would flub both? It took Nintendo the better part of the year to finally release "launch" games like Pikmin 3 and Wonderful 101, and it then only had a Zelda remake to tide players over until Mario. With third parties providing little in the way of exclusive content, Wii U is a wasteland of Nintendo 64 proportions. Ha ha, just kidding of course: Nintendo 64's second year had Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Mischief Makers, Star Fox, Blast Corps and Diddy Kong Racing. So it's arguably worse. Virtual Console is creaking along slowly with few new games (as opposed to Wii upgrades) and sales of the console are in the gutter. But Nintendo has never been shy about taking decisive action to change the course of things, so hopefully this is the moment that spurs them into action next year. — Chris Kohler